eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

04/22/2015

"In this country there is not the slightest danger of an over-development of warlike spirit"

Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss REVIEW

“IN THIS country there is not the slightest danger of an over-development of warlike spirit, and there never has been any such danger. In all our history there has never been a time when preparedness for war was any menace to peace. On the contrary, again and again we have owed peace to the fact that we were prepared for war; and in the only contest which we have had with a European power since the Revolution, the War of 1812, the struggle and all its attendant disasters were due solely to the fact that we were not prepared to face, and were not ready instantly to resent, an attack upon our honor and interest.” - Theodore Roosevelt, Address to the Naval War College, 1897.

Theodore Roosevelt’s father married a Southern belle from Georgia who had numerous close kin fighting for the Confederates. Thus, when the Civil War broke out, Teddy Roosevelt’s father opted for a non-combat position to placate his rebel wife. Young Theodore thus had a splinter planted in his ego that he never quite managed to pull out. Throughout his life, he seemed to always be aiming to get back into a fight and show the world that Roosevelts were not pansies. No doubt, his views of women and marriage were profoundly impacted as well.

“I believe that men and women should stand on an equality of right, but I do not believe that equality of right means equality of function; and I am more and more convinced that the great field, the indispensable field, for the usefulness of woman, is the mother of the family. It is her work in the household, in the home, her work in bearing and rearing her children, which is more important than any man’s work, and it is that work which should be normally the woman’s work, just as normally the man’s work should be that of the breadwinner, the supporter of the home, and if necessary, the soldier who will fight for the home.”

By the time Roosevelt wrote his epic history of America’s Imperial conquest of the West (The Winning of the West), his penchant for lionizing military valor was pronounced.

“Two or three hundred years later the Germans, no longer on the defensive, themselves went forth from their marshy forests conquering and to conquer. For century after century they swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine, and north of the Danube; and as their force spent itself, the movement was taken up by their brethren who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Atlantic. From the Volga to the Pillars of Hercules, from Sicily to Britain, every land in turn bowed to the warlike prowess of the stalwart sons of Odin. Rome and Novgorod, the imperial city of Italy as well as the squalid capital of Muscovy, acknowledged the sway of kings of Teutonic or Scandinavian blood.”

One suspects that the main reason that TR was ready to take a battalion into the trenches against Germany in 1917 was not that he criticized the Germans for being aggressive but that he was insulted at how little respect they had for American martial spirit. The Germans had thrown down the gauntlet by invading poor little Belgium without fear of any manly reprisal from a country like America.

I have been reading a number of Presidential biographies lately and this batch of them all seem to have this strain of machismo in them; Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon particularly. They seem inclined to want to prove that they are men with American soldiers. Maybe it has always been thus? Maybe this is why such men are so ambitious for power in the first place.

“Theodore Roosevelt was “a deeply moral man,” Auchincloss writes,

“He was first and foremost taken up in a lifelong and enthusiastic fight against lawbreakers; he was a policeman at heart, which was obviously why he had done so well as a Commissioner in New York. And above all, he detested bullies: The foulmouthed gunman he had seen terrifying customers in western bars, the back room machine politicians who milked the urban poor, the Pennsylvania mining tycoons who exploited their ignorant immigrant laborers. Like a Byronic hero he wanted not so much to raise the poor as to lower the proud.”

If one looks at his legislative and executive accomplishments, it becomes apparent that he enjoyed battling against strong powers for the benefit of weaker ones. “To sum up the major legislative accomplishments of Roosevelt and his two terms of office,” Auchincloss says,

“we might list them as follows: the Elkins law, against the railroad’s practice of giving rebates to favorite customers; the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor with its Bureau of Corporations, which grew to regulate every business that crossed state lines; The Hepburn Bill, which amended and vitalized the Interstate Commerce Act and gave government the power to set railroad rates; the Pure Food and Meat Inspection laws, which remedied some of the scandals of the meatpacking industry as exposed by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle; and the Employers Liability and Safety Appliance laws, which limited the hours of employees.

“There always had to be an element of wrongdoing in anything TR sought to crush,” the author continues, “a touch of crusade in any such proceeding.”

“To him there were good trusts and bad trusts. Bad trusts sought to profit by restricting production by trickery or device, by plotting against competitors, by oppressing wage earners, or by extorting high prices for a commodity made artificially scarce. If the trusts were not disciplined and regulated, then the real radicals would take over. As he put it: ‘We seek to defy law-defying wealth, in the first place to prevent it's doing evil, and in the next place to avoid the vindictive and dreadful radicalism which if left uncontrolled it is certain in the end to arouse.’"

One supposes that this is what inspired him to go off hunting after he left the Presidency. What could be more fun than killing predators?

“The expedition traversed Kenya and ended in Khartoum. It was estimated that TR and his son shot some 300 animals, and that TR was personally responsible for nine lions, eight elephants, twenty zebras, seven giraffes, and six buffaloes.”

I wonder who the zebras were bullying?

It is this disposition to enjoy the use of power against the powerful that no doubt led to his falling out with successor, William Taft. Taft, it appears, had all the power that Teddy Roosevelt no longer had and used it, to Theodore’s point of view, too sparingly.

“There was certainly no question at any rate that TR had to come to view Taft as the betrayer of all his progressive ideals, his so-called Square Deal, this despite the fact that the Taft administration had achieved an eight hour day for government employees, expanded the civil service, supported a constitutional amendment in favor of the income tax and brought more antitrust suits under attorney general George W. Wickersham, including the one that broke up the Standard Oil Company, than in all of TR's two terms. Yet a considerable part of the public agreed with the former president. Taft was widely seen as less zealous than his predecessor in his opposition to business monopoly, and his support of the protective tariffs in the interest of Wall Street strongly intensified this feeling.”

To Theodore Roosevelt, this seemed a reasonable enough excuse to end Taft’s presidency at one term and to let TR “Lock n’ Load” for another term. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” he insisted at his nomination. By doing so, he split the Republican Party and handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson, a cerebral and scholarly man who Roosevelt loved to despise. Four years later, TR hoped that he would be drafted to run again, announcing prior to the Republican convention of 1916,

"It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in it's mood something of the heroic – unless it feels not only devotion to ideals but the purpose measurably to realize those ideals in action."

Theodore Roosevelt passed his dedication to the manly application of martial valor to each of his sons. They all served in WWI and all were deemed worthy of their sire’s aspirations of them.

“The death of Quentin [TR's son] shortly before the end of the war,” Auchincloss concludes in his final chapter,

“was a devastating blow to the Roosevelts. TR has been described as sitting desolate on the porch at Sagamore [the family home], murmuring over and over, 'poor Quinikins! Poor Quinickens!' But he could still write proudly to an old rough-rider friend, Robert Ferguson, ‘it is bitter that the young should die, but there are things worse than death; for nothing under heaven would I have had my sons act otherwise then as they have acted. They have done pretty well, haven't they? Quentin killed, dying as a war hawk should ... over the enemies lines. Archie crippled, and given the French war cross for gallantry. Ted gassed once and cited for conspicuous gallantry. Kermit with the British military cross, and now under Pershing.’”

I feel guilty just sitting here writing about this man. I should be out fighting something.

Question for Comment: The recent movie American Sniper seems to suggest that this quality of Theodore Roosevelt’s is rare but necessary in real men; that there needs to be something … combative … something martial … primitive … and protective about them to qualify as men. What do you think of that notion?